About

I enjoy being involved with businesses whose focus is in technology based services or products; design and software development is after all, a lot of fun. It is my experience that, computer software is generic, and because computer software can and is applied to every facet of modern-day life (on, above, below ground and off world), it can be applied to telecommunications (mobile radios), controlling coils in an 4 tesla NMR body scanner, controlling irrigation and measuring soil moisture on a farm, monitoring financial tickers and providing real-time analysis of stock prices, managing patient records in a hospital, validating test results of satellite payloads, … What I sometimes like to do with folks, is try to educate their beliefs in where an engineer can apply such talents; there are no boundaries, except in the minds of some who don’t have any self belief. Albert Einstein said “a man who never failed, never tried anything new” and Winston Churchill said “A pessimist sees the difficulty in every opportunity; an optimist sees the opportunity in every difficulty”. Albert Einstein also said “Imagination is more important than knowledge, Knowledge is limited”

And so say all of us

Having lived and worked in a few countries, making use of my talents to the benefit of companies where I have been employed.

In New Zealand I truly learnt to be at one with my horse, it was here that I put in many hours in the dressage arena, in the forest, learnt to jump the jumps (even on an ex race horse called Ralph who was an eight times winner, patient and fast). I also did some winch launches on a Floater in Christchurch. Where ever I go, I find time to explore and go trekking; mixing the fun of software development with the outside, the wind and the rain.

Interests

History

Worked on a number of different types of system, mobile radio communications, case management systems, manufacturing production systems, hand-held products and instrumentation.

Most of these systems incorporate databases, man machine interfaces, back-end code libraries; such artefacts are common place in most computer-based systems these days. Although the business features in these products are not always the same, the engineering design expertise in these systems is migrate-able, moreover, the technical talents and skill sets are essentially the same in all of these types of system EDMS, CMS, ERP, CRM, ….

Event driven operating systems

I have designed event-driven operating systems for products such as a Nokia environmental control chamber for housing communications equipment, and a bacterial measurement and analysis system.

I learnt how to design event-driven operating systems in part leveraging skills that I learnt at college (state control systems, command and control theory); most of my experience in event-driven operating systems, has been gained on the job by working on a mobile radio telecommunications system. This system was a real-time command and control – event driven system that incorporated 4 FIFO event queues to control events and to schedule job tasks. The event queues were used to manage job tasks of different priorities, in this way it was possible for low priority events to be queued while higher priority event tasks were completed. The design incorporated a number of ‘state control model’ algorithms that were used to manage call processing for 1 to 1 duplex calls, 1 to many broadcast calls and many to many conference calls. The mobile radio system connected PSTN telephone networks to base station packet switched mobile radios and was in itself managed by a regional node controller that was responsible for issuing commands to the mobile radio digital audio switch for features such as billing and call routing.

Anyway, the point is that I learnt a lot about real-time command and control operating system design and used that project to further advance my technical talents into two further projects leveraging knowledge acquired from previous work.